10 Top Tools for Novelists
The software featured in this article is designed to meet the specialised needs of a budding novelist. There's the finest open source distraction-free tools, software designed to create visual novels, and tools to help capture and visualise ideas.

Openbravo is an ERP business solution for small and medium sized companies. Its database structure is originally based on Compiere. Openbravo uses a fully Web based client/server architecture, and can be used from any Web browser. It has support for PostgreSQL and Oracle database back-ends. It is currently available in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. Read more

The Market Analysis System (MAS) is an open-source software application that provides tools for analysis of financial markets using technical analysis. Some of the features of MAS are: Includes basic technical analysis indicators, such as Simple Moving Average, Exponential Moving Average, Stochastic, MACD, RSI, On Balance Volume, and Momentum, more advanced indicators, such as Standard Deviation, Slope of EMA of Volume, Slope of MACD Signal Line, Bollinger Bands, and Parabolic SAR. Users can also create new technical analysis indicators, including complex indicators based on existing indicators. MAS can be configured and run as a server that provides services for several clients at a time running on remote machines. Read morehot

CCruncher is a project for quantifying portfolio credit risk using the copula approach. It is a framework consisting of two elements: a technical document that explains the theory, and a software program that implements it.

Fairmat is a platform for modeling and pricing financial derivative contracts and capital investment projects. Fairmat enables modeling a financial contract or a project with many contingencies by decomposing it into basic parts. A commercial version is also available.

Free Market is a package for perfoming technical analysis on stock market data consisting of data and indicator servers communicating through corba to clients for gui charting, etc. Real time streaming quotes and an EasyLanguage compatible indicator server are included.

GeniusTrader aims to be a full featured toolbox to create trading systems. GeniusTrader consists of a bunch of perl modules associated to a few perl scripts. It has no graphical user interface since it's absolutely not needed to achieve its goals.

Gepolabo is a GNOME application for technical analysis of stock markets. Indicators are available as plugins. Quotes may be selected with criteria. Quotes are saved in a MySQL database. Quotations are updated from the Web (yahoo.com) or from files.

GreatCharts lets you draw a wide range of stock-charts. For example Candlestick, OHLC. and functions like MAC, Stochastic, RSI, etc. Charts can be plotted in a very configurable way, to any picture size.

gstalker is a stock and commodities chart viewer, similar in appearance and function to those commercially available such as metastok and superchartz. The only differences are that it is released under the GNU General Public License, and it lacks many of the useless features that users come to expect from commercial products.

LCDstocks is a Perl script that acts as an LCDproc client. It fetches stock quotes and latest news from teletext services through a bttv video device and displays them well-formatted on an external LCD.

Venice is a stock market trading programme that supports portfolio management, charting, technical analysis, paper trading and experimental methods like genetic programming. Venice runs in a graphical user interface with online help and has full documentation. Venice runs on UNIX, including Mac OS X and Windows.

A stock brokerage simulator. In other words, it is a program that lets a bunch of users create and track fictitious portfolios over the web based on stock symbols and prices from the real stock market.

Olf's Trading Journal offers the following features: data is stored in xml-format and can easily be processed by other programs, trades can be commented using text and images, import data from DepotXML and more.

(commercial) POP Portfolio Construction Suite is a package that runs under R and S-PLUS. It performs portfolio optimization with a number of integer and continuous constraints. More importantly it can also generate random portfolios that obey the given constraints but ignore utility.

PortfolioTracker allows you to track and manage your stock portfolio of Euronext shares in real time (with a 15 second delay). You can use it to assess your stock positions (price, daychange, gain, gain%, value, weight%) with one command.

A small perl program for tracking shares going above or below a given threshold value. Needs the Perl modules Socket, LWP::UserAgent, Mail::Sendmail and Getopt::Long to function properly. Notifies by email, xmessage, TTY output and also has support for HP printer displays.

ShareWatch is a tool that keeps you up to date with your shares and derivatives. It consists of server and client parts: ShareWatch server - constantly polls your share price provider, and provides a soap interface for ShareWatch clients. The ShareWatch client - is a lightweight ticker and HTML window which polls the ShareWatch server for prices.

With TickVue you can track the stock market in nearly real-time. It queries Yahoo Finance periodically, updates the stock values you are interested on and calculates your portfolio value and daily gain.

The trading-shim is a database driven connector API that provides a persistent store SQL backend database, translates operations to and from the Interactive Brokers Java TWS-API. It permits downstream clients to access several worldwide securities markets and exchanges (stocks, options, futures, bonds, Forex) for 'tick' data and history, to supervise trades of securities, and more.

viewportfolio is a python program that allows you to track the performance of a stock portfolio you establish in a data file. It pulls quote information from http://finance.yahoo.com/ and relies on the Quote.py python module.